Monday, August 17, 2015

A Memo From the Boss

There was a hit piece that came out this weekend in the NY Times, entitled Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace." So when I came in today on my yacht and helicopter, off my private elevator and got to my office, I wished to be the first to officially respond to this unabashed hit piece in this interoffice memo.
First off, this is not the Amazon I've been leading from Day One since 1994 and the execrable business and management practices detailed in the New York Times never once victimized me or my senior executive staff. And if I could stand to look at you and didn't exclusively know Fortune 500 Chairmen, CEOs and other corporate Chief Officers, I'm sure you'd all tell me the same thing.

No one ever once said to me as I took off for a few months on my yacht that I couldn't play the part of the bored rich man looking to salvage deep sea treasure. The shareholders, my real bosses, never once told me I couldn't take time off from work to negotiate buying the Washington Post for a quarter of a billion dollars.

And I can assure you, if I ever had to undergo the humiliating experience of an actual performance review, none of those necessary personal functions and responsibilities I'm sure we've all had would've been used as a criteria for or against me.

Had they been used against me, had I actually people to answer to, I would've summoned my entire executive management staff together at a retreat in New Mexico and strategized the bullet points of a meeting with my friends in the Seattle Chamber of Commerce for some much-needed support.

No one ever mandated I had to work 70-80 hours a week at the expense of my family. No one ever ordered me to get without a hand truck in under a minute a 55 gallon drum of anal lube on Amazon Prime Day in a stifling 100 degree warehouse fulfillment center in the armpit of the Deep South. No one ever once threatened my job by telling me to fulfill more and more unreasonable performance quotas in brutal working conditions and I'm sure every single one of my minimum wage-earning temp workers would say the same thing.

Why, I'm sure if they actually had a voice and could get through my army of flacks, they'd say they were perfectly entitled to go off, on request, to play tennis with Bill Gates or hobnob with Warren Buffet at his mansion in Omaha if they but requested personal time 24 hours in advance.

Secondly, there seems to be a misperception that the way in which I treat our authors, vendors such as Hachette, customers and so forth happens to be the same way I treat the submanagement staff. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Just because I bully big publishers into giving me the deep discounts I expect in my undeclared monopoly and make their catalogs disappear overnight if I don't get my way, just because I cheat authors by paying by the page as of July 1st while we still grab our 30% distribution fee on Kindle sales, just because we refuse to hire longterm temp workers and make them work in stifling conditions and just because we hired neo Nazis to control the workers who work in our German fulfillment centers does not mean I'm running a white collar sweatshop operation.

And now, I'm going to prove everything I just said by taking some time off from my job to buy the New York Times and seriously scrutinizing the actual necessity of everyone on their reporting staff.

As for the fact of women being excluded from my top management team, that's just incidental and untrue. Look here: Here's one. Now get off my back. C'mon, I'm not sexist. Just look at me! I have a fun, dorky face, sort of like Bobby Darin's retarded kid brother or a special needs Hobbit.

Jeff

PS Unless you wish to be docked for the time you spent reading this, you'd better double your quotas for today. J/K!

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Top 10 Changes to HBO's Sesame Street

After 46 seasons on PBS, the Sesame Workshop's executive management decided to move iconic children's show Sesame Street
to HBO for at least the next five seasons. This will double the present
programming of 18 episodes to 35 as well as increase the Sesame
Workshop's budget. The move will also allow for a Sesame Street spinoff show. But these are just some of the exciting changes that will take place. What are the others?

Good Times at Pottersville: Slavery Edition

Friday, August 7, 2015

Good Times at Pottersville, August 7, 2015

Saturday, August 1, 2015

A Time to Mourn

(By Cyril Blubberpuss, Esq)

Let us come not to praise Cecil but to bury him. At least, the pieces that are scattered around Walter Palmer's den in Minnesota. But let us also mourn what Cecil represented to many: A $45,000,000 safari industry in Zimbabwe that is now on hiatus thanks to the untimely slaying of Cecil's brother, Jericho.

I have a heart. After all, I, too, have a brother named Cecil, although he'd make for very poor sport, considering his asthma and unhealthy addiction to fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. When we'd play hide and seek around our father Ambrose's mansion with my cousins Astor and Cedric, we'd find Cecil every time and he'd look at us with those doe-like eyes and that deer-in-the-headlights look then wet his pants, which didn't exactly endear him to the staff.

But anyway, this is about the other Cecil and the blow to private industry he represents. And now, thanks to the badly-timed shooting of Jericho, the only thing separating his brother's cubs from the alimentary tract of another rival lion (Seriously, old man, you couldn't've waited a month or two and contented yourself with shooting squirrels with a .22?), rich, white big game hunters are now on a par with Bill Cosby and Donald's Trump's hairdresser.

With Zimbabwe's suspension of big game hunting around its famous preserves, wealthy Caucasian males will now have to go to Africa's other 53 undisputed countries.

And what's this world coming to when rich, white men can no longer simply go out and kill something with impunity? The bribes we pay each year alone would float your typical spear-jiggling African nation for a decade. Walter Palmer's $55,000 could've built a city on the fucking Serengeti.

Poaching from Africa is a proud Caucasian-American tradition that goes back centuries before there was an America. When Dutch slave traders would engage in their own extreme version of hide and seek with the indigenous population in the 15th century, they couldn't have realized they were building a new world that would be based on cotton, tobacco and whatever else we could whip the slaves into growing or picking for us.

Africa, historically, has been a one-stop shopping center for wealthy whites with erectile dysfunction issues and no prospects of making an honest living. White Man-ifest Destiny, as I like to call it, builds nations, economies and, well, destiny even if we have to coax the work being done by those who bring it out with the occasional whip.

I recall once back in 1965, our father Ambrose took Cecil and me to Kenya, the president's birthplace, for a big game safari. Oh, what a week that was! I still recall Father, his pith helmet atop his head, cigar proudly jutting from his face, looking like a character from a Hope and Crosby Road movie. He'd paid some local poachers the then princely sum of $1000 to find us a rare black panther. The movement named after them was just gaining steam and Father wanted to make a point by mounting the beast's head on the wall of his office just above his head and behind his office chair, draping the fur before his expansive mahogany desk. It would've been for the benefit of his black employees who were getting troublesome and uppity by asking for an extra nickel an hour.

Anyway, we were tooling around the Serengeti in our jeep and Father was just about to take a sip from an ice cold martini when our driver stopped and alerted us to a black panther about 150 yards straight ahead. Cecil, who by this time was only five, was thankfully able to hold his water, mostly because he wasn't the one being hunted.

So Father huffed and puffed his way out of the back seat of the jeep, struggling to chamber a round in his new 30.06 while our guide Zimbeebe acted as a spotter. Then the unexpected happened.

I still to this day do not know how a man can shoot off his penis with a 30.06 but somehow Dad managed it. He was so excited he wasn't watching what he was doing and didn't realize the safety was off. The next thing any of us knew, he was bent over and howling while the panther's attention was now fully captured. As it began stalking us, Zimbeebe helped Dad into the jeep and drove like mad to the nearest hospital in Nairobi.

The thing we remembered seeing was the panther, a magnificent female, contentedly chewing on Father's severed member as we backed away. From that point on until his passing in the 70's, Father would turn his wooden globe over in our den, find the Dark Continent and sadly sigh, muttering, "Ah, I didn't need it anymore, anyway." The following year, he'd hired a professional big game hunter, had him kill a black rhino and had the tusk surgically implanted where the Blubberpuss penis once was.

While Father was convalescing in the hospital, he wired his brother Osrick to cut short his sex tour in Hispaniola to come get us and take us back to Upper Manhattan. And there's a lesson to be learned in all this: Namely, that white men can and should reasonably expect to have their brothers watch over their young, a luxury we just can't give to lions like Jericho.